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Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

On Friday and Saturday, the winter storm now moving up the East Coast will unleash hurricane-force winds on Washington, blizzard conditions across parts of New York and New England, and inflict the worst coastal flood in Boston’s history.

By all accounts, this storm is a monster. It’s also the latest sign that New England’s long-feared coastal flooding problem is already here — and it’s time to admit climate change is its primary cause.

The storm’s strongest winds will point squarely toward the shore, smashing huge waves the size of three-story apartment buildings into coastal defenses, and roiling the sea as far away as South America. To make matters worse, it’s arriving in conjunction with a full moon, when tides are normally highest. The system is predicted to stall out for more than 24 hours just off the New England coastline — for an astonishing three straight tide cycles.

Although the storm is getting little attention in the national news, the National Weather Service and meteorologists across the Northeast are screaming at a fever pitch. Boston-area municipalities have taken heed, issuing evacuations, preparing dive-team equipment for water rescues, and deploying a temporary flood barrier designed as a climate change-resilience measure. Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker has activated the National Guard to help with preparations.

Call it a nor’easter, a “bomb cyclone,” a superstorm — in an era of worsening extreme weather, fierce winter systems like this are arriving with startling frequency. And flooding is by far the most dangerous and destructive consequence. This week’s storm, like every weather event, is inseparable from the context of the warming climate. Nor’easters like this one are now a threat to public safety on par with hurricanes, and it’s time we start treating them that way.

This week’s storm is larger in size than Hurricane Sandy, with winds just as strong. National Weather Service in Boston called the storm’s gusts “about as extreme as it gets” and labeled the flooding it will spur a “life and death situation.” In a harrowing statement, the agency warns of massive power outages, the destruction of coastal homes, and some neighborhoods being “cut off for an extended time” from the rest of the metro area. It’s possible that sea walls and other semi-permanent coastal defenses could be breached, or beaches and dunes erased from the map — exposing vulnerable coastal communities and permanently altering the geography of New England.

Nor’easters draw their energy from clashing regions of warm and cold air, often producing massive circulations double the size of hurricanes. Hurricanes usually have much stronger winds at ground level, though, which is why they’re typically more destructive. But as seas have risen across the northeastern U.S. over the past century due to climate change, the flooding impact of what were once relatively routine winter storms has quickly grown.

While hurricanes are also expected to eventually grow stronger, there’s no convincing evidence they clearly have yet — although last year’s hurricane season is a worrying harbinger. Nor’easters are also expected to get worse due to climate change, as warmer air provides them with additional water vapor, fueling their ability to strengthen. Add to that, sea levels in Massachusetts have increased by about a foot over the past 100 years, and should rise by a further 3 to 9 feet by the end of this century.

Winter superstorms that bring high-level coastal flooding to northern locales like Boston are already occurring with alarming regularity. Only 34 hurricanes have passed within 200 miles of the city since 1851 — an average of one every five years. And only nine of these created a significant rise in the tides. Meanwhile more than 90 of the top 100 floods in Boston were spawned by nor’easters, and 13 of the top 20 have happened since 2000.

Though it’s one of the most severe examples in history, today’s storm is not the first one to hit the most densely populated part of the country with the power of a hurricane. It’s not even the first one this year — in January, another “bomb cyclone” floated rafts of ice into flooded Boston streets.

There are around three strong nor’easters every winter, 15 times as frequent as hurricanes — plenty of opportunity for repeat flooding disasters. A study earlier this year showed that record flooding could happen in New York City every five years starting just a few decades from now, largely because sea level rise has transformed nor’easters into coastline-devouring monsters.

Storms like these — technically called “extratropical cyclones,” because they form outside the tropics — don’t come with scary cone-shaped tracking maps like hurricanes or official names that can be blasted across social media. Still, they have quickly become the single biggest threat to coastal development across most of the northeast.

Coastal floods are one of the leading indicators that the world is warming. Given the path we’re on, the worst is yet to come.

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Nor’easters are now just as dangerous as hurricanes

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Reality Begins to Set in on Obamacare—For Both Sides

Mother Jones

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Reality is setting in:

For seven years, few issues have animated conservative voters as much as the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. But with President Barack Obama out of office, the debate over “Obamacare” is becoming less about “Obama” and more about “care” — greatly complicating the issue for Republican lawmakers.

….As liberals overwhelm congressional town hall-style meetings and deluge the Capitol phone system with pleas to protect the health law, there is no similar clamor for dismantling it, Mr. Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment. From deeply conservative districts in the South and the West to the more moderate parts of the Northeast, Republicans in Congress say there is significantly less intensity among opponents of the law than when Mr. Obama was in office.

Intensity is the key word here, since actual opinions about Obamacare don’t seem to have changed more than a eyelash over the past seven years:

But the intensity of opinion has changed. With Obama out of office, the Republican base doesn’t care as much. Hating Obamacare was mostly just a way of hating Obama. Likewise, the Democratic base cares more. They spent the past seven years griping about how weak Obamacare was—no public option, too friendly to insurance companies, subsidies too low, blah blah blah—under the apparent assumption that it didn’t matter that practically no one was passionately defending the law. With Trump in office, Democrats have finally figured out that it matters, and congressional phones are now ringing off the hook.

So reality has set in for everyone. The Republican rank-and-file has finally figured out they never really cared all that much about taxing the rich an extra three points to provide health care for everyone. The Democratic rank-and-file has finally figured out that Obamacare is a pretty good program and it’s worth fighting for.

But did we really have to elect Donald Trump to figure this out?

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Reality Begins to Set in on Obamacare—For Both Sides

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Carbon prices are way down, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hold on Clean Power Plan

Carbon prices are way down, thanks to the Supreme Court’s hold on Clean Power Plan

By on Jul 5, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

A temporary halt to the federal government’s plan to cut electric power plant emissions has caused carbon prices in the Northeast’s only cap-and-trade program to plummet, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Carbon prices in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, have fallen 40 percent since the Supreme Court’s decision in February to stay the Clean Power Plan — from their peak at $7.50 per metric ton of carbon dioxide in December to $4.53 per ton in June.

RGGI is America’s first mandatory market-based cap-and-trade program, which places a collective limit on carbon emissions among its nine member states. Power plant emissions under that limit are called “allowances,” and the program stamps a price on them so they can be traded among polluters. Carbon prices are set at quarterly auctions, and proceeds are invested in state renewable energy, energy efficiency, and other sustainability programs.

The program is one of the Northeastern states’ strategies to comply with the Clean Power Plan if it withstands court challenges. The program is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions among all the New England states plus New York, Delaware, and Maryland as a way to reduce their contributions to global warming.

Experts disagree about what the sudden drop means for the future of carbon cutting in the Northeast and what direction the prices will go. Long-term low carbon prices could make it cheap to cut carbon throughout the Northeast, or it could chill future investment in renewables and other carbon-cutting measures because it will be less profitable to do so.

RGGI caps member states’ collective annual carbon emissions at a specific level, and they are set to decline 2.5 percent annually through 2020, encouraging states to develop renewables and other low-emissions energy sources to replace highly polluting ones.

RGGI auction prices for carbon pollution are considered low compared to California’s carbon trading market, where carbon emissions have been valued between roughly $12 and $13 per metric ton since 2014. RGGI prices had increased steadily from about $2 per ton 2012 to about $7.50 per ton 2015, but they fell sharply at the auctions held immediately after the Supreme Court decision.

U.S. Energy Information Administration analyst Thad Huetteman said the agency cannot comment on where prices may be headed because there are too many unknowns about RGGI’s future. But he said that if the Clean Power Plan is upheld in court, the EIA’s forecast suggests prices may remain low.

A spokesperson for RGGI declined to comment.

The James A. Fitzpatrick Nuclear Power Plant in Upstate New York.Nuclear Regulatory Commission

There is wide disagreement about the long-term implications of low RGGI prices and whether they’ll bounce back in the near future.

“Low RGGI prices hamper the region’s ability to pursue additional carbon cuts,” and make clean energy investment less profitable, said Jordan Stutt, a clean energy analyst for the Acadia Center, a New England climate policy think tank.

He said lower prices mean states earn less money from trading carbon, reducing the amount of auction money they will get that can be reinvested in state-run clean energy and energy efficiency programs.

RGGI has not established a carbon emissions cap for after 2020, and a new cap mandating strict emissions cuts could raise prices in the long run, he said.

William Shobe, a University of Virginia public policy professor who was part of the team that designed the RGGI carbon auction, is more optimistic about what low carbon prices mean for carbon cutting in the future.

Shobe said low carbon prices are good news for both the future of the cap-and-trade program and the region’s ability to slash its emissions.

“If you had a choice between high prices and low prices, you’d want low prices because the cost of accomplishing the (carbon cutting) goal is lower,” he said. “That means you’re getting what you want cheaper, and in the end you’ll want to buy more of it.”

The key is that RGGI states’ carbon emissions are determined by the cap they place on them, not the price of those emissions, he said.

“That’s the nice thing about cap-and-trade programs — you’ve got a guarantee you’re going to meet the emissions goal,” Shobe said. “The question is how expensive it’s going to be.”

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China’s Climate Plan Isn’t Crazy and Might Actually Work

Mother Jones

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Today Chinese President Xi Jinping and US President Barack Obama are planning to jointly announce long-awaited details of China’s plan to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by putting a price on carbon dioxide pollution. The plan, which will commence in 2017, will make China the world’s biggest market for carbon cap-and-trade, a system that sets a cap on the amount of CO2 that major polluters like power plants and factories can emit, then allows those entities to sell off excess credits (if they pollute less than the limit) or buy extra ones (if they pollute more than the limit).

The idea of a system like this is that it uses the market—rather than simply a government mandate—to force cuts in the emissions that cause climate change. Want to pollute? Fine, but it’s going to cost you. If you clean up, you can make cash selling credits to your dirtier neighbors. A similar type of policy, a carbon tax, imposes a different kind of financial incentive in the form of a fee paid to the government for every unit of CO2 emissions. Ultimately, the rationale behind both systems is the same: Because corporate polluters now have to pay a financial price price for their emissions, air pollution and fossil fuel consumption both go down, clean energy goes up, and the climate is saved.

Many environmental economists agree that some kind of carbon price—either cap-and-trade or a tax—is the most efficient and effective way to quickly curb fossil fuel consumption, and thus give us a chance at staving off global warming. Democrats in Congress attempted to enact a national cap-and-trade program in the US in 2009; it passed the House but was killed by the Senate Republicans. Since then, a national carbon pricing system has been a non-starter in Washington. But there are plenty of other examples of successful systems elsewhere that should make us optimistic about China’s new plan.

The Northeast United States: The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cap-and-trade market that includes nine states in the Northeast, set up in 2008. The program is widely considered a success and is expected to reduce the region’s power-sector emissions by 45 percent compared to 2005 levels by 2020. This year, the price of credits has been riding high, a sign that the market is working to create a powerful incentive to reduce emissions. The most recent auction of credits, in September, generated in $152.7 million for the states—revenue that is re-invested in clean energy programs and electric bill assistance for low-income households.

California: When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed through legislation in 2006 to set aggressive climate targets for the state, the key mechanism was a cap-and-trade program, which finally opened in 2013. So far, it seems to be working. Emissions are down, while GDP is up. In fact, the California program was a primary model for the Chinese system.

British Columbia: This Canadian province’s carbon tax, first enacted in 2008, is one of the most successful carbon pricing plans anywhere. Gasoline consumption is way down, and the government has raised billions that it has returned to citizens in the form of tax cuts for low-income households and small businesses. The program “made climate action real to people,” one Canadian environmentalist told my former colleague Chris Mooney.

Australia: For a country that is notoriously reliant on coal, Australia had been on the progressive side of climate politics after it passed a national carbon tax in 2012. The tax was scrapped just two years later, after then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott blamed it for a sluggish economic recovery and high energy prices. But the repeal actually yielded an unexpected insight into the success of the program: In the first quarter without the tax, emissions jumped for the first time since prior to the global financial crisis. In other words, the tax had worked effectively to drive down emissions.

Europe: Of course, carbon pricing systems aren’t without their flaws, and the European Trading Scheme has provided a good example of the risks. The system has often been plagued by a too-high cap, meaning the market becomes flooded with credits, the price drops, and polluters have little incentive to change. This month, regulators passed a package of reforms meant to restrict the number of credits and bolster the market. But even with the low price, the ETS has been effective enough to keep the EU on track to meet its stated climate goals.

Even with these good examples to draw from, there are still challenges ahead for China. How will the government allocate credits among different polluters? Will the polluters actually trade with one another? How effectively will the government be able to monitor emissions, to ensure that the credits actually match real pollution?

But at the very least, Republicans in the US just lost one their favorite excuses for climate inaction: That China, the world’s biggest emitter, is doing nothing.

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China’s Climate Plan Isn’t Crazy and Might Actually Work

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Strip club flooded by oil spill in L.A.

PAH dance, anybody?

Strip club flooded by oil spill in L.A.

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A strip club was left a sticky mess Thursday morning following yet another pipeline spill.

A geyser of an estimated 10,000 gallons of oil spewed 20 to 50 feet out of a 20-inch crude pipeline at 1 a.m., leaving an oily pool in an industrial swath of Northeast Los Angeles and sending two people to the hospital with nausea. Here’s more from the L.A. Times:

Crews were able to shut off the pipeline remotely, but by the time that was done, the spill had created pools of oil, some about 40 feet wide and knee-deep in some places.

“It looked like a lake,” [fire captain Jamie] Moore said. …

Firefighters were able to largely contain the spill after contacting a nearby cement company and using loads of sand to cordon off the oil with berms, creating a dam-like structure. Tanker trucks were then able to use hoses to suck up the oil from the resulting “lagoon,” Moore said.

Four businesses were affected by street closures, but none more so than the Gentleman’s Club, which was evacuated after it was flooded with crude. Pity whatever poor soul works as a janitor there.


Source
10,000-gallon crude oil spill in Atwater looked ‘like a lake’, L.A. Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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The 12 things the Obama administration wants you to know about climate change

The 12 things the Obama administration wants you to know about climate change

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Climate change is affecting you, right now. Yeah, you.

That’s the message from the Obama administration today. “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” says the latest National Climate Assessment, published by the White House. Every few years, by law, the federal government is required to publish such a report; this is the third and most comprehensive one put out. It’s a hefty catalogue of changes underway in America’s climate and weather — and of the changes we can expect to experience as greenhouse gases continue to turn the world into a more exotic and less welcoming place.

“Summers are longer and hotter, and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report says. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.”

The report is somewhat similar to the assessments published once or twice a decade by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Except that this report’s focus is solely on the U.S. And, unlike the IPCC reports, this one is actually a pleasure to look at – replete with graphics, animated gifs, and an easy-to-read website for those who would prefer to not slog through a huge .pdf or printed report.

The report divides climate impacts into 10 geographical regions: Northeast, Southeast and the Caribbean, Midwest, Great Plains, Southwest, Northwest, AlaskaHawai’i and Pacific Islands, Oceans, Coasts.

“Some of the changes discussed in this report are common to many regions,” it states. “For example, large increases in heavy precipitation have occurred in the Northeast, Midwest, and Great Plains, where heavy downpours have frequently led to runoff that exceeded the capacity of storm drains and levees, and caused flooding events and accelerated erosion. Other impacts, such as those associated with the rapid thawing of permafrost in Alaska, are unique to a particular U.S. region. Permafrost thawing is causing extensive damage to infrastructure in our nation’s largest state.”

The report painstakingly outlines the impacts of climate change across the nation on water resources (water won’t always flow out of your tap when you want it to), energy (more blackouts), human health (what rhymes with mosquito?), transportation (traffic jams and transit outages, especially near coasts), agriculture (food is getting harder to find — unless you’re a plague of warmth-fostered invasive pests), forests (drought, fire, disease, and ravenous insects where trees once stood), and ecosystems (weird seasons are pushing wildlife into hostile ecological terrain).

And it contains 12 main findings — big-picture things that every American needs to understand about climate change:

1. Global climate is changing and this is apparent across the United States in a wide range of observations. The global warming of the past 50 years is primarily due to human activities, predominantly the burning of fossil fuels.

2. Some extreme weather and climate events have increased in recent decades, and new and stronger evidence confirms that some of these increases are related to human activities.

3. Human-induced climate change is projected to continue, and it will accelerate significantly if global emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to increase.

4. Impacts related to climate change are already evident in many sectors and are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond.

5. Climate change threatens human health and well-being in many ways, including through more extreme weather events and wildfire, decreased air quality, and diseases transmitted by insects, food, and water.

6. Infrastructure is being damaged by sea level rise, heavy downpours, and extreme heat; damages are projected to increase with continued climate change.

7. Water quality and water supply reliability are jeopardized by climate change in a variety of ways that affect ecosystems and livelihoods.

8. Climate disruptions to agriculture have been increasing and are projected to become more severe over this century.

9. Climate change poses particular threats to Indigenous Peoples’ health, well- being, and ways of life.

10. Ecosystems and the benefits they provide to society are being affected by climate change. The capacity of ecosystems to buffer the impacts of extreme events like fires, floods, and severe storms is being overwhelmed.

11. Ocean waters are becoming warmer and more acidic, broadly affecting ocean circulation, chemistry, ecosystems, and marine life.

12. Planning for adaptation (to address and prepare for impacts) and mitigation (to reduce future climate change, for example by cutting emissions) is becoming more widespread, but current implementation efforts are insufficient to avoid increasingly negative social, environmental, and economic consequences.

So we have a lot to worry about. But the more than 300 experts who collaborated on the report, under the direction of the 60-member National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, have plenty of advice for taking action. A response strategies section includes a mitigation chapter (“the amount of future climate change will largely be determined by choices society makes about emissions,” it reminds us) and a chapter dealing with adaptation (“adaptation planning is occurring in the public and private sectors and at all levels of government,” it notes, “but few measures have been implemented.”)

This graphic shows some of the changes that we’ve unleashed upon the world, thanks to our appetites for fossil-fueled power:

National Climate AssessmentClick to embiggen.


Source
National Climate Assessment, globalchange.gov

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Atlantic coastal waters are the hottest since measurements began

Atlantic coastal waters are the hottest since measurements began

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A view of warming waters, from Cape Cod.

Would you like some broiled flounder with your serving of climate apocalypse?

Well, you’re going to have to broil it yourself, because record-breaking temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean are driving the fish away from fast-heating waters toward more hospitable depths and latitudes.

The Atlantic Ocean’s surface temperatures from Maine to North Carolina broke records last year, reaching an average of 57.2°F, nearly three degrees warmer than the average of the past 30 years.

That’s according to new data published by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which says the jump in average temperature from 2011 to 2012 was the largest recorded one-year spike in the marine region, which is known as the Northeast Shelf Ecosystem. Last year’s average temperature was also the highest recorded there since measurements began 150 years ago.

Here’s a graph that shows the spike:

NOAA

Click to embiggen.

And here’s another, showing last year’s water temperatures in red. The gray line represents average temperatures and the gray shading shows standard deviations from that average:

NOAA

Click to embiggen.

That’s not too shabby if you fancy a balmy dip in the brine. But the implications for the ecosystem’s wildlife and fisheries could be profound.

The production of plankton, which forms the basis of oceanic food webs, appears to have been affected. NOAA scientists discovered that fall plankton blooms were smaller than normal in the area last year, which would be making it harder for fish and other species to find food right now. And they found that the shelf’s fish and shellfish were fleeing from their normal habitats, chased north or into deeper waters by the extraordinary heat.

From Oceana:

These abnormally high temperatures are fundamentally altering marine ecosystems, from the abundance of plankton to the movement of fish and whales. Many marine species have specific time periods for spawning, migration, and birthing based on temperature signals and availability of prey. Kevin Friedland, a scientist in NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center’s Ecosystem Assessment Program, said “Changes in ocean temperatures and the timing and strength of spring and fall plankton blooms could affect the biological clocks of many marine species, which spawn at specific times of the year based on environmental cues like water temperature.”

Black sea bass, summer flounder, longfin squid, and butterfish were among the commonly fished species that moved northeast as the temperatures rose, NOAA says.

The record-breaking heat off the Atlantic coastline is typical of a worrisome worldwide trend. The world’s oceans are absorbing a lot of the globe’s excess heat. That’s helping keep down land temperatures in a warming world, but it threatens to throw marine ecosystems into turmoil. And scientists warn that the oceans won’t absorb so much of the extra heat forever. Eventually we’re going to broil not only the seas, but also the land.

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Waste heat from cities can heat up other parts of the planet

Waste heat from cities can heat up other parts of the planet

Cities aren’t perfectly efficient energy machines, you guys. They’re great, especially when transit and density make it possible for city dwellers to use less energy, but cities still release a lot of waste heat out of tailpipes and chimneys. And all that waste heat has to go somewhere.

According to a new study published in Nature Climate Change, that waste heat is disrupting the jet stream and warming up other parts of the world, thawing winters across northern Asia, eastern China, the Northeast U.S., and southern Canada. From Reuters:

That is different from what has long been known as the urban-heat island effect, where city buildings, roads and sidewalks hold on to the day’s warmth and make the urban area hotter than the surrounding countryside.

Instead, the researchers wrote, the excess heat given off by burning fossil fuels appears to change air circulation patterns and then hitch a ride on air and ocean currents, including the jet stream. …

[S]tudy author Aixue Hu of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado said in a statement that the excess heat generated by this burning in cities could change atmospheric patterns to raise or lower temperatures far afield.

Researchers say this is a “partial story” of where waste heat goes, but all that wandering heat adds up to, they say, a global temperature increase of about 0.02 degrees. I still love you, cities, but it wouldn’t hurt us to put on a sweater and take the bus, right?

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